Our Familiar War
Heeding Churchillian warnings.

by Joseph Shattan is the author of Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War
February 19, 2002 9:10 a.m.

lthough a great deal has been written about Islamic terrorism since September 11, the most cogent description of that phenomenon comes from Britain's former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. She compares it to early Communism: "Islamic extremism today, like Bolshevism in the past, is an armed doctrine. It is an aggressive ideology promoted by fanatical, well-armed devotees."

Mrs. Thatcher might have added that both Bolshevism and Islamism use strikingly similar language, methods, and goals. The Bolsheviks conducted their crusade under the banner of "class war"; the Islamists call their crusade a "holy war" (jihad). The Bolsheviks had nothing but contempt for Mensheviks, and other socialist democrats, who argued that socialism was not supposed to come about through blood and terror; the Islamists similarly despise traditional Islamic jurists who reject the indiscriminate murder of civilians as contrary to Islamic law. The Bolsheviks sought to place society in a Marxist-Leninist straightjacket; the Islamists want to bring every aspect of life under the control of the sharia (Islamic law). The Bolsheviks hoped to conquer the world for Communism; the Islamists seek to win the world for Islam.

One of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century was the West's failure to act against Bolshevism in its earliest, most vulnerable period. Those who sought to do so, like Winston Churchill, were dismissed by their contemporaries — as George Bush is currently being dismissed by the Europeans — as reactionary know-nothings. Yet Churchill's warning, delivered in 1919, bears repeating today:

[The Bolsheviks] seek as the first condition of their being the overthrow and destruction of all existing institutions and of every State and Government now standing in the world. They too aim at a worldwide and international league, a league of the failures, the criminals, the unfit, the mutinous, the morbid, the deranged and the distraught in every land; and between them and such order of civilization as we have been able to build up since the dawn of history there can, as Lenin rightly proclaims, be neither truce nor pact.

Replace Lenin with bin Laden (or Khomeini, or Saddam Hussein, or that unregenerate arch-terrorist, Yassir Arafat) and you have an excellent picture of what we are up against today.

Fortunately, a few Western figures appear to have learned something from the 75-year struggle with Bolshevism. Churchillian leaders like President George W. Bush and former Prime Minister Thatcher are not about to sit back and allow today's Bolsheviks to acquire the weapons of mass destruction with which they can terrorize the world. They are determined to act — and the future of civilization hangs on their success.